Man and Other Metals
by Katla
Summary: Erik knows he can't change human nature — he can't even change his own. Magnets attract and repel, attract and repel, forever.


I didn't love _Apocalypse_ , but I always love Erik. Naturally, his suffering in the movie prompted me into this outpouring of grief. Apparently I cope with pain over fictional characters by writing the pain right out of my heart. Only that method of coping leaves a lot to be desired because it doesn't work, ahaha... *dies of a broken heart*

Anyway.

Let me know what you think!

* * *

 **Man and Other Metals**

* * *

Charles Xavier is a determined man. A few days after Erik meets him for the first time, he feels a tentative brush across his mind, like the echo of distant footsteps.

"What are you looking for?" he asks, terse but teasing in a way only Charles seems able to interpret. Charles smiles, almost mischievous, and the footsteps retreat. He shrugs delicately.

"Hope."

Charles' smile grows wearier as the years pass. And yet, every time Erik sees him again, he feels that mental touch and hears the echoing footsteps. Charles searches tirelessly for hope.

Every time, Erik disappoints him.

xxXxx

There are many, many trees in the corner of Poland where he settles. The atmosphere calms him after his failure at the White House. He doesn't enjoy many things, but there are a few things left that he doesn't hate. Sunlight filtered through pine and spruce is one of them.

Magda is another. Her smile, her touch, and her trust are a balm against the wounds he bears like an invisible second skin. Magda isn't afraid of him.

But neither was Mother, when she took a bullet to the head. Neither was Charles, when he took one to the spine.

Metal is his element, but he never seems able to control the shards that really matter.

Magda isn't afraid; Erik always is.

xxXxx

He knows it's a mistake to marry Magda. Nothing lasts, especially not happiness.

Especially not for him.

When Magda tells him she's pregnant, he almost says _this is a mistake_ aloud, but her smile is so bright and her eyes are glowing with joy and he can't — _won't_ — be the one to smother that light.

Charles would congratulate him, he knows. Which is really an argument against the entire undertaking, because Charles is foolishly and hopelessly optimistic. He dreads and doubts and tries to think about leaving before he destroys this, too.

It's his mother who shames him out of the thought. Her sad eyes and broken smile. She would have loved any child of Erik's.

He often hears her voice and Charles' as worry pounds a dull, insistent drumbeat in his mind. Their actions speak even more eloquently than their words across the years. _Love is never a mistake_.

But it always has been, for him. The ones he loves always suffer for it.

 _Mistake, mistake, mistake,_ the drumbeat pounds, right up until the moment he holds Nina for the first time.

With the illuminating violence of a lightning strike, he realizes that this is not a mistake, after all. This is perhaps his first truly good decision.

xxXxx

Everything in nature circulates. Air currents, bloodstreams, magnetic fields. The flow can be slowed or hurried, but nature is never stopped. The evolution of the human race is proof of that.

But Erik forgets all thoughts on the cycles of evolution, blood, and magnetics when he stands under the trees with Nina. "What is that?" she asks, again and again as a toddler, just able to speak.

"Trees," he answers, following her rapt eyes and clumsily pointing fingers. Sometimes he says, "deer," or "flowers," or "birds." Every time, she looks on with delight. Erik can't remember what it's like to see the world with hope, eyes catching on beauty instead of suffering. A heart filled with awe instead of the expectation that everything will end. But he learns by watching Nina. Sometimes, now, he smiles about the trees and deer and flowers, too.

They live quietly for so long that Erik almost forgets there are alternatives to safety and peace. His mind is full of Nina and Magda, now. His former fears are resigned to dark corners, dim but persistent specters that wait just out of sight. Nina grows taller and brighter and Erik almost forgets how it feels to live with ghosts in place of people.

But the natural world is not the only thing that flows in endless circuits. Human nature cycles as well, through fear and anger and destruction. There is only one thing that reliably circulates through the world like lifeblood.

Hate.

The police come so quickly, the day after he saves a friend at the factory, and they bring all his ghosts with them.

"Are you the one called Magneto?"

Not "the man." Not even "the criminal." He's a thing, to them.

Nina screams when they try to take him away. He is reminded of himself so forcefully that it fills his mouth with a metallic tang like blood. He'd screamed for his mother when they'd been dragged apart; Nina screams for him, now.

Cycles, always cycles. The world is a circle in more ways than one.

He and Magda had suspected that Nina's affinity for befriending animals might be more than her habit of feeding those that wandered up to the house; all their thoughts and worries are confirmed when her cries pull flocks of birds from the trees to frenzy around the policemen.

"She can't control it —" he tries to explain, but the arrow is already splitting the air, the distance—

—Nina's heart, and Magda's, where they are pressed close together.

The birds are silent, now.

His arms are around them both before they fall.

"Not my babies," he hears himself say, begging someone, _anyone_ , even though it's already too late. The trace metals in Nina and Magda's blood have gone still — he feels it, a stark contrast to the way his own blood is churning like molten iron, burning through his veins no matter how fiercely he wants to will it into matching stillness.

The locket dangling against Nina's chest catches the light. It takes very little effort to call it to his fingertips to lie cold against his palm.

It takes no effort at all to send it through the the neck of each man behind him. He doesn't need to look at them; their blood sings to him in the way that his wife and daughter's never will again. The locket slaps back into his palm, hot with blood, but cooling. There is nothing but silence. Only Erik's blood sings and circulates now.

 _What's that, Papa?_

 _Cycles_ , he thinks. _Circuits_. Her eyes are empty.

 _Death_.

Everything in nature circulates.

Until it doesn't.

xxXxx

 _Momma says I'll give you gray hairs._

 _You, my Nina? Never._

But she does. After she is gone, he finds the first silver strands. It's only logical, he thinks, that decay finds him in her absence.

Nina had only ever brought life.

xxXxx

After years of silence and distance, Erik hears the careful footsteps. Countries away, Charles is reaching for him.

Charles' sorrow for him comes like a wave, warm and enveloping. Erik knows what will come next before Charles projects the words into his mind. _Don't do this._

He's made his decision, and he has no strength to argue with Charles. Their disagreements don't matter; nothing does. Not anymore. He should wrench his mind out of Charles' grip and think no more about it.

He doesn't, not immediately, because his heart has been flayed open and Charles' voice in his mind feels like a warm hand on his shoulder, radiating sympathy and sorrow. Charles always did sympathy so well.

Charles described his mother's funeral to him once. Cold and austere, like the house she left to him. It was very sad, and Charles' eyes were damp when he spoke about it.

But Erik thinks that Charles doesn't really know grief. If he could form the words out of his molten distress, he would tell Charles that grief is hot and blinding. Like your mother's blood on your hands. Like the rip in your throat when you cried until your voice became a scream. Like being alone, always, even when you sacrificed every principle you held sacred not to be.

 _Your mother was distant, Charles, but at least she was alive. At least your grief was cold and settled, when you saw her lying in a casket in the end. You've never felt your whole life die. Their blood was hot on my hands, Charles..._

He isn't sure how many of his heaving thoughts make it clearly through their link, and he doesn't care.

He disappoints Charles again, and turns away from him.

Yes, Charles is sympathetic. He has shed tears with Erik as he has with many of his troubled students, and it's good of him. But perceiving pain is different than feeling it. Charles is like a man who hears echoes of screams, and has never screamed himself.

There is a difference.

xxXxx

It's the first time he's seen Charles in ten years, and he thinks he would be feeling a great many things if he wasn't blasted and dead inside his chest. He's distantly aware that he doesn't like Charles being exposed and defenseless against the rocks, but it's like a whisper buried under the constant scream inside his head.

Charles couldn't run from Apocalypse even if he had the use of his legs, of course, but the fact that he can't run at all sticks in Erik's mind.

(He still sees Charles on the beach, face crumpled in pain. _I can't feel my legs_.

His fault, his fault, his fault. But he can't feel this either, not anymore.)

Charles is looking at him as he always does, like he's a potential source of light in impenetrable darkness. Searching, always, for hope.

But there is no more light, not for Erik. Not for anyone.

Charles is disappointed, again.

xxXxx

Erik doesn't want Charles to die.

It's the only thought he's able to hold onto as the world splinters around him. He's surrounded by the strongest magnetic fields he's ever generated, a shield made of invisible force and broken pieces of metal. No one can penetrate it. Not Mystique, when she appears and asks him to help her band of mutants. Not the boy beside her with silver hair and sad eyes.

Erik remains encapsulated in the sphere of his power when they leave him, but he looks for Charles in the ruin all around. Apocalypse is close to his goal. He will take Charles' powers and force order over the world at last. It's a tempting vision: humans erased, mutants living in order and peace. Apocalypse might occupy and control every mind, but even that thought carries a hint of relief. Erik is tired of thinking and feeling. Thoughts and feelings are as meaningless as everything else.

Charles would disagree with him. Charles would insist that there is always room for hope.

Charles, who is on the verge of destruction so far below him. If Apocalypse succeeds, the world will change, but Charles won't be in it.

He still thinks that everything is worthless, broken, hopeless. But Charles deserves to live, even if the rest of the world does not. Nina had deserved to live, too. He couldn't save her. He _can_ save Charles.

So he does.

xxXxx

"Stay," Charles urges, quiet and sincere. Because Erik is weak just now, exhausted from days of no sleep and too much emotion, he lets himself imagine it. A clean and quiet room in the mansion. Speaking to Charles every day. Children all around, learning, smiling, living.

It's there that his happy vision breaks, shattering like Nina's last choked breath.

"I can't," he answers. The truth is he can't bear it.

He can't bear seeing so much life when his daughter is cold under the earth. When she will never have the opportunity to be in Charles' school learning to hone her powers. Learning, most importantly, to be kind. Magda would have wanted that for her.

Erik wants it too. But what he wants and what he can have are like the opposite poles of the earth: two points connected only by intangible magnetic forces, forever barred from touch.

He spends the walk to the edge of the school grounds thinking of Charles and the lines that are deepening on his face. The creases of sorrow have also furrowed his own skin. There are a few laugh lines mixed in, the only lingering signs of his time with Magda and Nina. And Charles, in years long past.

He remembers Charles as he was when they met, a young man with bright, hopeful eyes and too much confidence in the goodness of his fellow men. He remembers the team they'd recruited with promises of hope and change.

Gone now, all gone. The kids who'd lived had hardened into adults; the hope for change had crumbled like so much ash.

He pauses on the soft, green grass beyond the school's gate and beside the road. In the surrounding sprinkle of trees he sees Nina's face, smiling and gentle, reaching out to the deer and the birds and the flowers. The sun feels cool and indifferent on his skin, but the image warms him for a moment outside the bounds of time. For that moment, she is safe and so is he.

But the spell can't last, and Nina's face shatters into tears and screams and terrible silence that even the whisper of the wind can't break. He doesn't cry; there aren't any tears left in him.

He leaves, again, and thinks that this is the one thing that will never change.

 _I thought I was alone._

One of the first things he'd said to Charles when they'd met.

Charles' voice is faint in his memory. _I was right about you._

Erik isn't used to knowing more than Charles, but, for once, he has the satisfaction of knowing what Charles seems incapable of understanding.

Erik knows that they are both right.

He walks away from Charles and his school and his hope; memories trail him like a shadow.

 _"_ _What is a magnet, Papa?"_

 _"It can move metal. A magnet attracts and repels." She doesn't understand. The words escape her bright, puzzled little mind. He simplifies, so the words will reach her._

 _"_ _My Nina. A magnet sometimes holds fast, and sometimes pushes away."_

* * *

 **Notes:** *broken sobbing* Erik breaks my heart every time. Also, when Michael Fassbender cries, I cry. That went about as well as you would imagine in _Apocalypse_. :0 I wish the movie had done more character work with everyone, but Magneto is always a compelling character, even in movies that are somewhat subpar, it would seem. Tell me your thoughts on the movie and on the fic!

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 _Please review!_


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